- I’m David Montgomery ’08
- I work as a data journalist
- I also host a history podcast, The Siècle, about 19th Century France

2/6/2020

Today I’m going to combine those interests with one of yours: conflict and violence. My most recent episode took on a topic that remains the subject of fierce debate in the fields of conflict studies and international relations: the Congress of Vienna of 1814-15.
The key questions:
The Congress of Vienna, and other diplomatic agreements signed around the same time that often get lumped together with it, came at the close of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars — a chain of interrelated conflicts that saw most of Europe at war almost continuously from 1792 to 1814, and then again briefly in 1815. Millions of soldiers and civilians died; economies were devastated, land ransacked and trade throttled; and, not least to the people who lived through it, ways of life were irrevocably overturned around the continent.
It was in this spirit that the great powers of Europe came together in Vienna — the same spirit that brought countries together in Westphalia two centuries earlier or Versailles a century later.
There were attempts to punish the losers and benefit the winners, of course. But the overarching goal was to find a way to prevent this from happening again.